The Internet is a rich medium, filled not only with text, but with graphics and diagrams, photographs, videos, audio clips, and other media types. In particular, graphics such as photographs, logos, diagrams and other images, appear almost everywhere on the Internet. Graphics are included with almost every story listed on news websites and blogs. They show up throughout online storefronts as depictions of physical products that can be purchased and shipped to your house. They are on company websites depicting the corporate brand or otherwise lending impact to the presentation.
At the same time that images have become an indispensable part of the design of websites, an ever increasing volume of images are created, contributed, and stored on websites on behalf of individuals who do not own the website. These images are referred to as user-generated content, or UGC, to distinguish them from content generated by the website owner, designer, or creator, or content that is professionally produced and distributed, such as stock photography. Photographs of friends, family, pets, vacations, and anything else one can imagine are stored online for safety, archiving, or to be easily shared with other people.
For a given image, there is at least one rights owner who can grant permission to individuals using the photograph to make further use of it, for example to print it. There is also a website operator who can facilitate that action, for example by providing a print button. And finally there is a viewer, who may be interested in taking some action pertaining to a given image.
By way of example, think of photographs stored in an online album website such as Photobucket.com. Depending on the online album website chosen by the content creator, the actions that can be taken with those photographs by a visitor to the website vary according to rules set by the website manager and/or the rights owner of the selected image. The photographs may or may not be easily printable in full resolution and with high quality settings on a home printer. There may or may not be a straightforward way to order 4×6 or 5×7 prints and have them mailed to a home address. There may or may not be a way to order an article, such as a calendar or a mug, bearing the image.
Now consider each party involved. To enable a given capability, for example the ordering of prints of a photograph, a great deal of work must be done. The company hosting the website (host) must do development work to add the option of ordering prints, and the host must establish a business relationship with the print provider. The host must also decide which images on their site should be able to be ordered as prints, based on factors such as image resolution and the rights granted to the host and/or to the entity requesting the print by the image owner (rights owner).
The rights owner, meanwhile, may want to monetize a particular image through charging on a per print basis, or may wish to prohibit such actions. There is no easy way for the rights owner to notify the website owner of those preferences programmatically. If the parties agree on a usage, then they must arrange a billing relationship so the host and the rights owner can be paid for their respective contributions. The rights owner may also want reports on how their image is used, which puts an onus back on the hosting company to provide that functionality.
The fulfillment vendor who is creating the prints receives requests from each photograph hosting company, each of which results in a separate business transaction, such as billing and technical integration.
The viewer and purchaser then must deal with a user experience that is different on every website. The viewer may have to enter billing information—even if they've done so already on other UGC websites. Each website may have a different fulfillment vendor, resulting in different product results. The viewers do not have a consistent set of choices available when they want to perform an action on media, especially when such actions might be charged for. Even seemingly “basic” options such as high quality printing may not be readily available in many cases.